Using Open Resources in HE — does it need a change in approach?

My OKHE1 submission considered Open Educational Resources (OERs), in particular those available under license via managed repositories, from the point of view of my experience of them as an eLearning specialist, and how well, or not, they were taken up in my sphere of work. Reading the other submissions made me reflect more on where OERs sit in the wider sense of openness, and how different types of open education and resources can be accessed and used, but with the acknowledgement that there are tangential and related positions and considerations far beyond this, a much broader canvas. However, there are overall themes, and for this post, I’d like to try and focus a little on how the potential use of different kinds of OERs might affect online teaching practice in HE, particularly at course level, and within the structured delivery mechanisms we use. I won’t discuss open access publishing or research, which OER Knowledge Cloud define as “typically referring to research publications of some kind released under an open licence” but rather teaching and learning materials, either released under such a licence or not, but recognising that there is an overlap with journals and scholarly articles. I’ll also briefly try and decipher some of the terminology around ‘openness’, and whether or not it is useful in understanding the application and purpose of open resources.

Within UNESCO’s 2002 definition of OERs as “technology-enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes”, OERs make sense to the learner when they are taken and blended into a teaching programme. The academic, the tutor, the educator, is the principal consumer and the adapter. The student receives the end-product — what has been done with that resource in terms of contextualising it within an overall instructional design framework. Van Mourik Broekman et al (2015, p.ix) interpret the distinction between the broader term ‘Open Education’ as designating an “activity and practice”, and ’OER’ which “tends to be reflective of a distinct history of technical, legal and/or funding frameworks”. In this interpretation of OERs, openness is often perhaps more directed at educators, since the OERs are likely to be accessed from within the educational setting, via organisational and institutional repositories under a licensing framework, and delivered through the mechanisms provided for by that environment, for example a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). They are less ‘open’ to the general populace, in the sense that their value comes from their repurposed context.

The move towards replacing these kinds of funded OER repository based frameworks with “forums and engagement spaces” to “share resources peer to peer”, Communities of Practice and subject area Open Guilds, as noted in my OKHE1 post on OER Repositories, may broaden access to these resources, but educators are still likely to be the primary consumers at point of initial ‘transaction’.

‘Open Education’ could perhaps be used to describe online resources where, to an extent, the context has already been provided, it is ‘ready to go’ and the learner benefits from a hopefully fully structured and thought out educational resource. OpenCourseWare, run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is an example of a repository of ready-made courses open to all. MOOCs are prominent at the moment, which, depending on which platform you use, tend to follow a similar pattern which may include an introductory video, aims and objectives, topic outlines, contributions from experts in the field, a discussion forum, reflective questions, data and analysis, quizzes, weekly summary. All of the resources together make up a learning pathway. It is a complete package, which couldn’t easily be used in any other way than how it’s been designed. There is a move towards incorporating reflective questions, links and prompts into videos themselves in MOOCs, for example Coursera is now designed structurally to support that expectation. The idea of context embedded within the videos makes them more of a self-contained resource. But even so, could they reasonably be taken out of their environment and used as a standalone learning resource, or incorporated into another learning environment. Or could a whole MOOC be used as an integral part of a course module? In this respect, the ‘openness’ of MOOCs and open courses perhaps differs from that of OERs since they are more likely to be accessed and used by the learner, and not re-used or re-purposed by the educator. While MOOCs were originally open both in the sense of enrolment and also in that the materials were licensed under the Creative Commons Licence, the latter has not been the case for the new generation of MOOCs, although MOOCs will themselves make use of Creative Commons resources, and OERs. A guest post by Peter B. Kaufman, Redefining Open, on the Creative Commons website, argues that MOOCs do not “intersect” with the Commons or the original intention of the Open Courseware movement, and “are destined to stay outside unless we do something.”

Platforms such as TED Studies, which aims to democratise education by providing a low cost “structured educational experience” for students, professor and self-learners to “explore important topics in higher education”, and the KHAN Academy, sit somewhere in the middle of the openness continuum, being both reusable and adaptable by educators and ‘off-the-shelf’ learning packages for independent learners, wrapped in a recognised and trusted ‘brand’. MIT themselves launched an initiative targeted specifically at independent learners, the OCW scholar, and one targeted at educators, OCW Educator, comprising a library of “instructional approaches and teaching materials” to reuse and adapt.

Weller (2011) makes a useful distinction between ‘big’ and ‘little’ OERs, putting forward the idea that OERs exist on a continuum of resources which “vary in granularity, quality and explicit learning intentions”. He acknowledges that this is a wider definition of OERs than that which references large-scale, externally funded projects. In this definition, ‘little’ encompasses that stuff on the internet that anyone can access and use, YouTube, Slideshare, Flickr and so on. These resources could perhaps be termed ‘open resources’ for learning, since their educational value is generally not explicitly stated. They are unregulated in terms of quality, educational value, accuracy, currency, bias. And yet, in practical terms, it is often these which are more likely to be used by academic staff and embedded into online learning modules. And they are also very likely to be used by learners.

As ‘learner consumers’, YouTube or Wikipedia may be the go-to places to pick up tips on fixing a toaster, learning how to knit, or checking out the discovery of nuclear fission, but can the results of a Google search provide the kind of educational value students need for independent learning in HE, without any educational context? And yet, as Adams et al (2013) argue, one of the most popular ways students in HE seek academic information is through using the Internet and search engines, and they cite several studies where students prefer these over “consulting the professional sites available from reputable academic and other institutions”. Google will often return a set of scholarly articles at the top of its search results. But it’s not always easy to judge which resources are most applicable. A recurring comment from our annual Best of Blackboard competition in which students would nominate online courses or practice which had enhanced their learning, particularly amongst undergraduate students, was that they greatly appreciated being guided to the most relevant internet resources to supplement their learning, that having some filtering done for them gave them confidence and assurance. One way in which we see these kinds of ‘little’ open resources being used in Blackboard courses is as a springboard to independent learning, but there are also examples where they have been embedded more contextually as part of a learning pathway through a topic, with associated student activities.

But for both academics and students, self-selection of open resources and content requires knowledge and understanding of how that resource supports their own particular learning objectives. Diana Laurillard proposes a distinction between ‘formal’ educator-curated learning and ‘informal’ learning, which is “entirely in the hands of the learner, not guided by anyone, and certainly not educators.” In this world of openness, of OERs, open courseware and apps, is it more important than ever that educators use their knowledge to select and marshall those resources and find ways to contextualise them into the students’ learning journey using appropriate methodologies and pedagogies?

While Weller’s ‘little’ OERs may not explicitly state their educational value, OERs under licence may not be ‘open’ enough in their design, being frequently developed for a specific purpose. If they are constraining in terms of their learning intentions do they present as being too intractable to bend to a new purpose? For educators this presents a challenge of evaluation. Adams et al (2013) suggest that there are a number of open questions yet to be answered around how both staff and students evaluate resources, how they “perceive OERs on the spectrum from ‘big’ formal providers to those ‘little’ individual ones”, whether there are disciplinary or cultural differences in use, and how easy it is “to find related derivative OERs that might better suit a users’ needs?”.

In their discussion on approaches to validating the quality of open educational resources, the authors of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) publication Giving Knowledge for Free (2007), suggest that one option, rather than adopting a formally designed process, is to allow individuals to judge quality and usefulness on whatever grounds they choose, following the argument that “quality is not an inherent part of a learning resource but contextual. It is only the specific learning situation that determines whether a resource is useful or not”. But how do educators make these decisions? Littlejohn and Hood (2016) argue that while engagement with OERs and also open education practices (OEP) is gaining momentum within the “changing societal expectations of education and learning”, change in professional practice is needed and “requires the development of a range of knowledge types and a rethinking of what it means to be a teacher and a learner”. This has some resonance with Kenneth Grieve’s suggestion in his OKHE1 post that assuring the quality of found information may change the educator’s role from “an expounder (and interpreter)” to “reviewer and proof-reader”. He does acknowledge a possible slight exaggeration here, and I would argue that interpretation remains critical for educators integrating OERs into teaching design, but the point about role change is important. Littlejohn and Hood (2016) go on to explore the ways in which educators may learn through experimentation and engagement with OER, and propose the three areas of knowledge teachers must develop on their journey to embedded engagement as being “resource employment”, “resource evaluation” and “resource knowledge development”.

These notions of “resource employment” and “resource evaluation” both seem to be a good fit with instructional design, which is something we in eLearning are keen to promote and support. Members of the team have developed the Humanities eLearning Design process to facilitate course and programme teams in re-working or developing new units, with a focus on ‘placing outcomes and student activity at the heart of course design’.

Littlejohn (2003) discusses how an incremental approach is needed for staff development in the reuse of learning resources, where the basic level is skills in resource discovery (and evaluation), intermediate is resource authoring and sharing, and advanced is developing skills in course design and development. I’d suggest that course design skills come earlier in this sequence, and that they are essential in making effective use of open resources, whether using a structured OER or an individually produced resource found via a Google search. Authoring and sharing, the idea of designing materials for adaptation from the outset, is a specific skill for those who wish to do so. Littlejohn identifies a key problem in course design as being a “tendency for tutors to focus on content rather than student activity”. I would concur with this, and it’s something we have found in our day-to-day support activities and particularly during our HeLD workshops, where the instinct for the participants is often to list resources first, with statements along the lines of ‘then we’ll have a video / quiz/ blog’, at which point we come in with prompts around what the students are going to do with the resource — before, during, after interacting with it, how does it relate to the face-to-face teaching, how will it demonstrate their learning? Littlejohn suggests this risk increases when reusing online resources, that the inclusion of the resource in itself does not lead to engagement and may encourage “surface learning”. Course, or instructional, design skills for online learning are needed to embed the purpose, the pedagogy, of the resources within the overall course. Our HeLD process focuses strongly on storyboarding, as a way of planning student activity, and Littlejohn proposes that storyboarding itself can provide a reusable framework within which individual resources can be substituted and updated. Such reusable storyboards could potentially be shared both within and across different disciplines. This is something I’d like to explore further in my work, and something we’ve started looking at particularly in relation to Distance Learning courses.

There is growing evidence of the recognition that there is a staff development requirement in enabling educators to make use of OERs in their teaching practice. Bradshaw et al (2013) report on a JISC funded project from 2011–12 to develop an HEA accredited online module (itself an OER) “through a pedagogy which values collaboration and innovative assessment processes” to “provide an environment for staff to develop an understanding of the power of re-purposing of OERs”. They adopted a community focused approach where the module design was underpinned by the notion of three types of community member, those from whom the OERs are derived, those who are engaged in the design and presentation of an online teaching module, and those who are students of the module.

Terras et all (2013) also argue that both educators and students need effective media literacy skills to realise the learning potential of OER, and that while educators need to be able to select and frame resources, “the shift towards a more active learning environment” means that students need “higher order thinking skills such as critical thinking, judgement and evaluation” to be able independently to make “use of OERs in a judicious and useful way.”

So can we envisage a time when learners develop their own learning pathways using the open resources available to them, through the “proliferation of online education tools, non-academic open learning environments”, and in the context of “a dramatic increase in student mobility resulting in global ‘shopping’ for education” (Van Mourik Broekman et al, 2015, pp. 30–31)? Should educators move on from the curriculum and teacher-centred models of teaching, and their inherent assumptions? The way students engage with MOOCs, for example, varies enormously. Students are in charge of how far they interact with the training and with other participants, if they wish to simply dip in and sample a few aspects they can. But they are making those decisions in an environment where scaffolding and modelling of the learning pathway has taken place. Does easy access to free online resources automatically engender learner autonomy? Or does it mean that there is a greater requirement for educators in HE to filter, extract and contextualise appropriate resources, to take even more of a role in signposting students to resources which are relevant and suitable for their courses? Higher Education is a system based on testing and measuring attainment, where teaching is geared towards achieving defined outcomes, evidencing fulfilment of learning objectives. If learning takes place outside of the teaching environment, with learners interacting with resources which are not designed to support those learning outcomes, how can we ensure that learning is still recognised? Sugata Mitra, talking about an initiative whereby Indian schoolchildren explored questions online collaboratively, proposes that learning can be thematic and fluid, “learning at the edge of chaos”, but that this raises challenges of measurement. In his OKHE1 post, Kenneth Grieve expresses the view that testing and measuring students’ abilities in an open world is a “major dilemma in tertiary education”. In their consideration of ‘Open Learning 2.0’ Deiman & Friesen (2013) argue that “assessment and credentialing should remain under direct institutional control, thus ensuring quality and rigour”.

Whatever happens in the movement of open education and the OER agenda, however resources are licensed, framed, shared, there is recognition that a change in teaching methodologies and practice is needed to harness the potential of this ever-growing supply and to enable learners to make the best use of them on their learning journey. And for that to happen, institutions need to recognise this in their staff development strategies, but that’s another discussion.

References:

Adams, A., Liyanagunawardena, T., Rassool, N. & Williams, S. (2013) Use of open educational resources in higher education, British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 44 No 5 2013 E149–E150 doi:10.1111/bjet.12014, accessed: 20/05/16

Bradshaw, P., Younie, S. & Jones, S. (2013), Open education resources and higher education academic practice, Campus-Wide Information Systems, Vol. 30 Iss 3 pp. 186–193 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10650741311330366, accessed: 20/05/16

Cox, G. (2013) Researching Resistance to Open Education Resource Contribution: an activity theory approach, E–Learning and Digital Media, Volume 10, Number 2, 2013 www.wwwords.co.uk/ELEA 148, http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2013.10.2.148, accessed: 20/05/16

Deimann, M. & Friesen, N. (2013) Exploring the Educational Potential of Open Educational Resources, E–Learning and Digital Media, Volume 10, Number 2, 2013 www.wwwords.co.uk/ELEA 112 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2013.10.2.112, accessed: 20/05/16

Hockings, C., Brett, P. & Terentjevs, M. (2012) Making a difference — inclusive learning and teaching in higher education through open educational resources, Distance Education, 33:2, 237–252, DOI: 10.1080/01587919.2012.692066, URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2012.692066, accessed: 20/05/16

Littlejohn, A. & Hood, N. (2016) How educators build knowledge and expand their practice: The case of open education resources, British Journal of Educational Technology doi:10.1111/bjet.12438

Littlejohn, A. (2003) An incremental approach to staff development in the reuse of learning resources, pp.221–233, in Littlejohn, A. (ed) (2003) Reusing Online Resources, (Kogan Page Limited) ISBN: 0 7494 3950 5

OECD (2007) Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources, ISBN-978–92–64–03174–6, OECD Paris.

Terras, M. M., Ramsay, J. & Boyle, E. (2013) Learning and Open Educational Resources: a psychological perspective, E–Learning and Digital Media, Volume 10, Number 2, 2013 www.wwwords.co.uk/ELEA 161 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2013.10.2.161, accessed: 20/05/16

Van de Merwe, A. D. (2013) Are Higher Education Institutions Positioned To Reap The Dividends Of Open Education Resources? International Business & Economics Research Journal — September 2013 Volume 12, Number 9, accessed: 20/05/16

Van Mourik Broekman, P., Hall, G., Byfield, T., Hides, S. & Worthington, S. (2015) Open Education: A Study in Disruption, (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd) ISBN: PB 978–1–78348–209–2

Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice, 96–113, Chapter DOI: 10.5040/9781849666275.ch-009